What proof exists that the Nazis practiced
genocide or
deliberately killed six million Jews?

1. What proof exists that the Nazis practiced genocide or
deliberately killed six million Jews?

The IHR says (original, Samisdat, and revised versions combined):

None. The only evidence is the postwar testimony of individual
"survivors." This testimony is contradictory, and no
"survivor" claims to have actually witnessed any gassing.
There are no contemporaneous documents and no hard evidence whatsoever:
no mounds of ashes, no crematoria capable of disposing of millions of
corpses, no piles of clothes, no human soap, no lamp shades made of
human skin, no records, no credible demographic statistics.

Nizkor replies:

Lie piled upon lie, with not a shred of proof.

This is as good a place as any to present some detailed evidence
which is consistently ignored, as a sort of primer on Holocaust denial.
It will make this reply much longer than the other sixty-five, but
perhaps the reader will understand the necessity for this.

Let's look at their claims one at a time:

Supposedly the only evidence, "the postwar testimony of
individual survivors."

First of all, consider the implicit conspiracy theory. Notice how the
testimony of every single inmate of every Nazi camp is automatically
dismissed as unconvincing. This total dismissal of inmates' testimony,
along with the equally-total dismissal of the Nazis' own testimony (!),
is the largest unspoken assumption of Holocaust-denial.

This assumption, which is not often spelled out, is that the
attempted Jewish genocide never took place, but rather that a
secret conspiracy of Jews, starting around 1941, planted and forged
myriad documents to prove that it did; then, after the war, they
rounded up all the camp survivors and told them what to say.

The conspirators also supposedly managed to torture hundreds of key
Nazis into confessing to crimes which they never committed, or into
framing their fellow Nazis for those crimes, and to plant hundreds of
documents in Nazi files which were never discovered until
after the war, and only then, in many cases, by sheer luck.
Goebbels'
diary, for example, was barely rescued from being sold as
7,000 pages of scrap paper, but buried in the scattered manuscript were
several telling entries (as translated in Lochner, The
Goebbels Diaries, 1948, pp. 86, 147-148):

February 14, 1942:
The Führer
once again expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe
pitilessly. There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it. The Jews
have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them. Their
destruction will go hand in hand with the destruction of our enemies. We
must hasten this process with cold ruthlessness.

March 27, 1942: The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and
not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the
Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will
have to be liquidated whereas only 40 per cent can be used for forced
labor.

Michael Shermer
has
pointed out
that the Nazis' own estimate of the number of European Jews was eleven
million, and sixty percent of eleven million is 6.6 million. This is
fairly close to the actual figure. (Actually, forty percent was a
serious overestimate of the survival rate of Jews who were captured,
but there were many Jews who escaped.)

In any case, most of the diary is quite mundane, and interesting only
to historians. Did the supposed Jewish conspiracy forge seven thousand
pages to insert just a few lines? How did they manage to know Goebbels'
affairs intimately enough to avoid contradictions, e.g. putting him or
his associates in the wrong city at the wrong date?

As even the revisionist
David Cole
has
admitted,
revisionists have yet to provide a satisfactory
explanation of this document.

Regarding postwar testimony from Nazis, were they all tortured into
confessing to heinous crimes which they supposedly did not commit? This
might be believable if only a few Nazis were captured after the war, or
maybe if some had courageously stood up in court and shouted to the
world about the supposed attempt to silence them. But hundreds
testified regarding the Holocaust, in trials dating from late 1945
until the 1960s. (For example, see
Böck,
Hofmann,
Hössler,
Klein,
Münch,
and
Stark.)

Many of these Nazis testified as witnesses and were not accused of
crimes. What was the basis for their supposed coercion?

Many of these trials were in German courts. Did the Germans torture
their own countrymen? Well, Holocaust-deniers sometimes claim that the
Jews have secretly infiltrated the German government and control
everything about it. They prefer not to talk too much about this theory,
however, because it is clearly on the lunatic fringe.

The main point is that not one of these supposed torture victims --
in fifty years, not one -- has come forth to support the claim
that testimony was coerced.

On the contrary, confirmation and reconfirmation of their testimony
has continued across the years. What coercion could have convinced Judge
Konrad Morgen
to testify to the crimes he witnessed at the International Nuremberg
Trial in 1946, where he was not accused of any crime? And to later
testify at the Auschwitz trial at Frankfurt, Germany, in 1963-65? What
coercion was applied to SS Doctor
Johann Kremer
to make him testify in his own defense in 1947, and then, after having
been convicted in both Poland and Germany, emerge after his release to
testify again as a witness at the Frankfurt trial? What coercion was
applied to
Böck,
Gerhard Hess, Hölblinger, Storch, and Wiebeck, all former SS men,
all witnesses at Frankfurt, none accused of any crime there?

Holocaust-deniers point to small discrepancies in testimonies to try
to discredit them. The assumption, unstated, is that the reader will
accept minor discrepancies as evidence of a vast, over-reaching Jewish
conspiracy. This is clearly ludicrous.

In fact, the discrepancies and minor errors in detail argue
against, not for, the conspiracy theory. Why would the
conspirators have given different information to different Nazis? In
fact, if all the testimonies, from the Nazis' to the inmates', sounded
too similar, it is certain that the Holocaust-deniers would cite
that as evidence of a conspiracy.

What supposed coercion could reach across four decades, to force
former SS-Untersturmführer Dr.
Hans Münch
to give an
interview,
against the will of his family, on Swedish television? In the 1981
interview, he talked about
Auschwitz:

Interviewer: Isn't the ideology of extermination contrary to a
doctor's ethical values?

Münch: Yes, absolutely. There is no discussion. But I
lived in that environment, and I tried in every possible way to avoid
accepting it, but I had to live with it. What else could I have done?
And I wasn't confronted with it directly until the order came that I
and my superior and another one had to take part in the exterminations
since the camp's doctors were overloaded and couldn't cope with it.

Interviewer: I must ask something. Doubters claim that
"special treatment" could mean anything. It didn't have to be
extermination.

Münch: "Special treatment" in the terminology
of the concentration camp means physical extermination. If it was a
question of more than a few people, where nothing else than gassing
them was worthwhile, they were gassed.

Interviewer: "Special treatment" was gassing?

Münch: Yes, absolutely.

And what supposed coercion could reach across four decades, to force
former SS-Unterscharführer
Franz Suchomel
into giving an interview for the film Shoah? Speaking under
(false) promises of anonymity, he told of the crimes committed at the
Treblinka
death camp (from the book Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, 1985, p. 54):

Interviewer: You are a very important eyewitness, and you can
explain what Treblinka was.

Suchomel: But don't use my name.

Interviewer: No, I promised. All right, you've arrived at
Treblinka.

Suchomel: So Stadie, the sarge, showed us the camps from end
to end. Just as we went by, they were opening the gas-chamber doors,
and people fell out like potatoes. Naturally, that horrified and
appalled us. We went back and sat down on our suitcases and cried like
old women.

Each day one hundred Jews were chosen to drag the corpses to the
mass graves. In the evening the Ukrainians drove those Jews into the
gas chambers or shot them. Every day!

Ask the deniers why they shrug off the testimony of Franz Suchomel.
Greg Raven will
tell you
that "it is not evidence...bring me some evidence, please."
Others will tell you that Suchomel and Münch were crazy, or
hallucinating, or fantasizing.

But the fantasy is obviously in the minds of those who choose to
ignore the mass of evidence and believe instead in a hypothetical
conspiracy, supported by nothing but their imaginations.

That total lack of evidence is why the "conspiracy
assumption" almost always remains an unspoken assumption.
To our knowledge, there has not been one single solitary
"revisionist" paper, article, speech, pamphlet, book,
audiotape, videotape, or newsletter which provides any details about
this supposed Jewish/Zionist conspiracy which did all the dirty work.
Not one.

At best, the denial literature makes veiled references to the World
Jewish Congress perpetuating a "hoax" (in
Butz,
1976) -- no details are provided. Yet the entire case of
Holocaust-denial rests on this supposed conspiracy.

As for the testimony of the survivors, which the
"revisionists" claim is the only evidence, there
are indeed numerous testimonies to gassings and other forms of
atrocities, from Jewish inmates who survived the camps, and also from
other inmates like POWs. Many of the prisoners that testified about
the gassing are not Jewish, of course. Look for instance at the
testimony of Polish officer Zenon Rozansky about the first homicidal
gassing in Auschwitz, in which 850 Russian POWs were gassed to death,
in Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 154:

Those who were propped against the door leant with a curious
stiffness and then fell right at our feet, striking their faces
hard against the concrete floor. Corpses! Corpses standing bolt
upright and filling the entire corridor of the bunker, till they
were packed so tight that it was impossible for more to fall.

Which of the "revisionists" will deny this? Which of them
was there? Which of them has the authority to tell Rozansky what he
did or did not see?

The statement that "no 'survivor' claims to have actually
witnessed any gassing" is clearly false; this was changed to
"few survivors" in later versions, which is close to the
truth.

But we do not need to rely solely on testimony, from the survivors,
Nazis, or otherwise. Many wartime documents, not postwar
descriptions, specifically regarding gassings and other atrocities, were
seized by the U.S. armed forces. Most are in the National Archives in
Washington, D.C.; some are in Germany.

If it has rained for instance for only one half hour, the van cannot
be used because it simply skids away. It can only be used in absolutely
dry weather. It is only a question now whether the van can only be
used standing at the place of execution. First the van has to be
brought to that place, which is possible only in good weather. ...

The application of gas usually is not undertaken correctly. In order
to come to an end as fast as possible, the driver presses the
accelerator to the fullest extent. By doing that the persons to be
executed suffer death from suffocation and not death by dozing off as
was planned. My directions now have proved that by correct adjustment
of the levers death comes faster and the prisoners fall asleep
peacefully.

And Just wrote of the gas vans to Rauff, on June 5, 1942, in a letter
marked both "top secret" and "only copy". This is
a horrific masterpiece of Nazi double-talk, referring to killing as
"processing" and the victims as "subjects" and
"the load." (See Kogon, Nazi Mass Murder, 1993, pp.
228-235.)

Since December 1941, for example, 97,000 were processed using three
vans, without any faults occurring in the vehicles. ...

The normal capacity of the vans is nine to ten per square meter. The
capacity of the larger special Saurer vans is not so great. The
problem is not one of overloading but of off-road maneuverability on
all terrains, which is severely diminished in this van. It would appear
that a reduction in the cargo area is necessary. This can be achieved
by shortening the compartment by about one meter. The problem cannot
be solved by merely reducing the number of subject treated, as has been
done so far. For in this case a longer running time is required, as
the empty space also needs to be filled with CO [the poison exhaust
gas]. ...

Greater protection is needed for the lighting system. The grille
should cover the lamps high enough up to make it impossible to break
the bulbs. It seems that these lamps are hardly ever turned on, so the
users have suggested that they could be done away with. Experience
shows, however, that when the back door is closed and it gets dark
inside, the load pushes hard against the door. The reason for this is
that when it becomes dark inside, the load rushes toward what little
light remains. This hampers the locking of the door. It has also been
noticed that the noise provoked by the locking of the door is linked to
the fear aroused by the darkness.

Slip-ups occurred in written correspondence regarding the gas
chambers themselves, some of which, fortunately, escaped destruction
and were found after the war. A memo written to SS man Karl Bischoff
on November 27, 1942 describes the gas chamber in Krema II not with
the usual mundane name of "Leichenkeller," but rather as the
"Sonderkeller" "special cellar."

And two months later, on January 29, 1943, Bischoff wrote a memo to
Kammler, referring to that same chamber as the
"Vergasungskeller." (See Gutman, Anatomy of the Auschwitz
Death Camp, 1994, pp. 223, 227.) "Vergasungskeller"
means exactly what it sounds like: "gassing cellar," an
underground gas chamber.

Holocaust-deniers turn to
Arthur Butz,
who provides a specious explanation for the Vergasungskeller:
"Vergasung," he says, cannot refer to killing people with
gas, but only to the process of converting a solid or liquid into gas.
Therefore, he says the "Vergasungskeller," must have been a
special room where the fuel for the Auschwitz ovens was converted into
gas -- a "gasification cellar."

There are three problems with this explanation. First,
"Vergasung" certainly can refer to killing people
with gas; Butz does not speak German and he should not try to lecture
about the language. Second, there is no room that could possibly serve
this function which Butz describes -- years after writing his book, he
admitted this, and helplessly suggested that there might be another
building somewhere in the camp that might house a gasification cellar.
Third, the type of oven used at Auschwitz did not require any
gasification process! The ovens burned solid fuel. (See Gutman,
op. cit., pp. 184-193.)

So what does the term "gassing cellar" refer to?
Holocaust-deniers have yet to offer any believable explanation.

An inventory, again captured after the war, revealed fourteen
showerheads and one gas-tight door listed for the gas chamber in Krema
III. Holocaust-deniers claim that room was a morgue; they do not offer
to explain what use a morgue has for showerheads and a gas-tight door.
(See a
photograph
of the document, or
Pressac,
Auschwitz: Technique and Operation, 1989, pp. 231, 438.)

We take this occasion to refer to another order of March 6, 1943,
for the delivery of a gas door 100/192 for Leichenkeller 1 of Krema
III, Bw 30a, which is to be built in the manner and according to the
same measure as the cellar door of the opposite Krema II, with peep
hole of double 8 millimeter glass encased in rubber. This order is to
be viewed as especially urgent....

Why would morgues have urgently needed peepholes made out of a double
layer of third-of-an-inch-thick glass?

The question of whether it can be proved that the cyanide gas was
used in the Auschwitz gas chambers has intruiged the deniers. Their
much-heralded
Leuchter Report,
for example, expends a great deal of effort on the question of
whether traces of cyanide residue remain
there today. But we do not need to look for chemical traces to
confirm cyanide use (Gutman, op. cit., p. 229):

Letters and telegrams exchanged on February 11 and 12 [1943] between
the Zentralbauleitung and Topf mention a wooden blower for Leichenkeller
1. This reference confirms the use of the morgue as a gas chamber:
Bischoff and Prüfer thought that the extraction of air mixed with
concentrated prussic acid [cyanide] (20 g per cu m) required a
noncorroding ventilator.

Bischoff and Prüfer turned out to be wrong, and a metal fan
ended up working acceptably well. But the fact that they
thought it necessary demonstrates that cyanide was to be
routinely used in the rooms which deniers call morgues. (Cyanide is
useless for disinfecting morgues, as it does not kill bacteria.)

Other captured documents, even if they don't refer directly to some
part of the extermination process, refer to it by implication. A
captured memo to SS-Brigadeführer Kammler reveals that the
expected incineration capacity of the Auschwitz ovens was a combined
total of 4,756 corpses per day (see a
photograph
of the document or Kogon, op. cit., p. 157).

Deniers often claim that this total could not be achieved in practice
(see
question 45).
That's not the point. These crematoria were carefully designed, in 1942,
to have sufficient capacity to dispose of 140,000 corpses per month --
in a camp that housed only 125,000. We can conclude that massive deaths
were predicted, indeed planned-for, as early as mid-1942. A camp
designed to incinerate its full capacity of inmates every four
weeks is not merely a detention center.

Finally, apart from the abundant testimonies, confessions, and
physical evidence of the extermination process, there is
certainly no want of evidence of the Nazis' intentions and
plans.

But what should be done with the Jews? Do you think they will be
settled down in the 'Ostland' [eastern territories], in [resettlement]
villages? This is what we were told in Berlin: Why all this bother? We
can do nothing with them either in the 'Ostland' nor in the
'Reichkommissariat.' So liquidate them yourself.

Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feeling of pity. We
must annihilate the Jews, wherever we find them and wherever it is
possible, in order to maintain the structure of the Reich as a whole.
...

We cannot shoot or poison these 3,500,000 Jews, but we shall
nevertheless be able to take measures, which will lead, somehow, to
their annihilation....

That we sentence 1,200,000 Jews to die of hunger should be noted
only marginally.

Himmler's
speech at Posen on October 4, 1943 was captured on audiotape (Trial
of the Major War Criminals, 1948, Vol. XXIX, p. 145, trans. by
current author):

I refer now to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the
Jewish people. This is one of those things that is easily said:
"the Jewish people are being exterminated," says every Party
member, "quite true, it's part of our plans, the elimination of
the Jews, extermination, we're doing it."

The extermination effort was even mentioned in at least one official Nazi
court verdict. In May 1943, a Munich court wrote in its
decision
against SS-Untersturmführer
Max Taubner
that:

The accused shall not be punished because of the actions against the
Jews as such. The Jews have to be exterminated and none of the Jews
that were killed is any great loss. Although the accused should have
recognized that the extermination of the Jews was the duty of Kommandos
which were set up especially for this purpose, he should be excused for
considering himself to have the authority to take part in the
extermination of Jewry himself.

AndHitler
spoke quite clearly in public on no fewer than three occasions. On
January 30, 1939, seven months before Germany invaded Poland, he spoke
publicly to the Reichstag (transcribed from
Skeptic magazine,
Vol. 2, No. 4, p. 50):

Today I want to be a prophet once more: if international finance
Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed once more in plunging
nations into another world war, the consequence will not be the
Bolshevation of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the
annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

By the way, this last phrase is, in German, "die Vernichtung
der jüdischen Rasse in Europa," which German-speakers will
realize is quite unambiguous.

In September, 1942:

...if Jewry should plot another world war in order to exterminate
the Aryan peoples in Europe, it would not be the Aryan people which
would be exterminated but Jewry...

On November 8, 1942:

You will recall the session of the Reichstag during which I declared:
if Jewry should imagine that it could bring about an international
world war to exterminate the European races, the result will not be the
extermination of the European races, but the extermination of Jewry in
Europe. People always laughed about me as a prophet. Of those who
laughed then, countless numbers no longer laugh today, and those who
still laugh now will perhaps no longer laugh a short time from now.

There are many other examples of documents and testimonies that could
be presented.

Keep in mind that the
IHR's
answer to "what proof exists?" is "none." It has
certainly been demonstrated already that this pat answer is totally
dishonest. And this is the main point we wish to communicate: that
Holocaust-denial is dishonest.

We continue by analyzing the remaining, more-specific, claims about
what evidence supposedly does not exist.

"No mounds of ashes" is an internal contradiction.
In an article in the journal published by the same IHR that publishes
these Q&A, the Journal's editor reported that a Polish commission in
1946 found human ash at the Treblinka death camp to a depth of over
twenty feet. This article is available on
The IHR's web site.

(Apparently some survivors claimed that the corpses were always
thoroughly cremated. Because uncremated human remains were mixed with
the ash, the editor suggested that the testimonies were false.
Amazingly, he had no comment on how a twenty-foot layer of human ashes
came to be there in the first place. Perhaps he felt that to be
unworthy of mention.)

There are also piles of ashes at
Maidanek.
At
Auschwitz-Birkenau,
ashes from cremated corpses were dumped into the rivers and swamps
surrounding the camp, and used as fertilizer for nearby farmers' fields.

"No crematoria" capable of disposing of millions of
corpses? Absolutely false, the crematoria were more than capable of
the job, according to both the Nazis' own internal memos and the
testimony of survivors. Holocaust-deniers deliberately confuse
civilian, funeral-home crematoria with the huge industrial ovens of the
death camps. This is discussed in much detail in the replies to
questions
42
and
45.

"No piles of clothes"? Apparently, the IHR considers
piles of clothes to be "hard evidence"! This is strange,
because they do not deny the other sorts of piles found at Nazi camps:
piles of
eyeglasses,
piles of shoes (at
Auschwitz,
Belzec,
and
Maidanek),
piles of
gold teeth,
piles of
burned corpses,
piles of
unburned corpses,
piles of
artificial limbs
(see Swiebocka, Auschwitz: A History in Photographs, 1993, p. 210),
piles of
human hair
(ibid, p. 211),
piles of
ransacked luggage
(ibid, p. 213),
piles of
shaving-brushes
(ibid, p. 215),
piles of
combs
(ibid),
piles of
pots and pans
(ibid),
and yes, even the piles of
clothes
(ibid, p. 214)
that the IHR claims do not exist.

Perhaps the authors of the 66 Q&A realized that it was dangerous
for them to admit that these piles were hard evidence, because then
they would also be forced to admit a number of other things as
"hard evidence." Perhaps this is why they removed this
phrase from the revised 66 Q&A.

If items were not generally found in mass quantities, it is only
because the Nazis distributed them to the German population. A
memo
on this was captured, revealing that they even redistributed women's
underwear.

"No human soap"? This is true, but misleading. Though
there is
some evidence
that soap was made from corpses on a very limited experimental scale,
the rumored "mass production" was never done, and no soap made
from human corpses is known to exist. However, there is sworn testimony,
never refuted, from British POWs and a German army official, stating
that soap experiments were performed, and the recipe for the soap was
captured by the Allies. To state flatly that the Nazis did not make soap
from human beings is incorrect.

"No lamp shades made of human skin?" False --
lampshades and other human-skin "ornaments" were introduced as evidence
in both trials of Ilse Koch, and were shown to a U.S. Senate
investigation committee in the late 40s. We know they were made of
human skin because they bore tattoos, and because a microscopic
forensic analysis of the items was performed. (A detailed page on this
is being prepared.)

"No records"? This is nonsense (which may explain why
this claim was removed from the "revised" versions of the 66
Q&A). True, extermination by gassing was always referred to with
code-words, and those victims who arrived at death camps only to be
immediately gassed were not recorded in any books. But there are
slip-ups in the code-word usage that reveal the true meanings, as
already described. There are inventories and requisitions for the Krema
which reveal items anomalous with ordinary use but perfect for mass
homicidal gassing. There are deportation train records which, pieced
together, speak clearly. And so on. Several examples have been given
above.

"No credible demographic statistics"? This is the
second internal contradiction -- see
question 2
and
question 15.
The Anglo-American committee who studied the issue estimated the number
of Jewish victims at 5.7 million. This was based on population
statistics. Here is the exact breakdown, country by country:

Germany

195,000

Austria

53,000

Czechoslovakia

255,000

Denmark

1,500

France

140,000

Belgium

57,000

Luxemburg

3,000

Norway

1,000

Holland

120,000

Italy

20,000

Yugoslavia

64,000

Greece

64,000

Bulgaria

5,000

Rumania

530,000

Hungary

200,000

Poland

3,271,000

USSR

1,050,000

Less dispersed refugees

(308,000)

Total number of Jews killed

5,721,500

(This estimate was arrived at using population statistics, and not by
adding the number of casualties at each camp. These are also available
-- for instance, a
separate file
with the ruling of a German court regarding the number of victims in
Treblinka
is available. The SS kept
rather accurate records, and many of the documents survived, reinforced
by eyewitness accounts).

Some estimates are lower, some are higher, but this is the magnitude
in question. In an article in CMU's student newspaper, the head of
CMU's History Department, Peter Stearns, is quoted as saying that newly
discovered documents -- especially in the former USSR -- indicate that
the number of victims is higher than six million. Other historians
claim not much over five million. The Encyclopedia of the
Holocaust uses 5,596,000 as a minimum and 5,860,000 as a maximum
(Gutman, 1990, p. 1799).

In summary:

"Revisionists" often claim, correctly, that the burden of
proof is on historians. The proof, of course, has been a matter of
public record since late 1945, and is available in libraries around the
world. The burden has been met, many, many times over. You've just
seen a brief presentation of some of the highlights of that immense
body of proof; much more is readily available.

To even argue that the Holocaust never happened is ludicrous. To
claim straight-faced that none of this proof even exists is beyond
ludicrous, and it is a clear example of "revisionist"
dishonesty.

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